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No control over your robots.txt file The problem. Shopify does not allow store owners to edit their robots.txt file. This is an issue because the platform creates duplicate URLs for products associated with a collection/category page. “The ideal solution would be to use robots.txt disallow directives to block these pages from being crawled in the first place,” Kevin Wallner, founder of First Chair Digital, told Search Engine Land, noting that, while Shopify does add canonical tags pointing back to the correct product URL, this does not prevent the duplicate URLs from being crawled and potentially indexed. Solutions: Editing your Shopify theme, as discussed in our technical SEO for Shopify guide, is one way to resolve this issue. Alternatively, pages not included in your robots.txt file can be hidden from search engines by customizing the section of your theme’s layout file, as detailed on this Shopify help page. You can also use an app such as Sitemap & NoIndex Manager to add noindex tags and remove URLs from your sitemap, Wallner suggested. “Unfortunately this won’t work for duplicate product URLs, but it works for several other special Shopify page types with little to no SEO value, so it’s still a good move,” he said. Related: Shopify SEO Guide: How to increase organic traffic to your store Wallner also advised that store owners avoid linking to duplicate URLs in their header, footer, sidebars, breadcrumbs and within the text on their pages. If particular pages have earned important backlinks, store owners can also get in touch with webmasters to request that they link to the preferred URL.

Shopify stores generally score 20 or less on Google’s mobile PageSpeed Insights, with first contentful paint taking about 3.5 seconds, he added

Duplicate product pages are also a facet of Shopify. As an inherent characteristic of the framework Shopify is built on, category pages link to duplicate product pages, and although they do canonical back to the correct landing page, this may dilute link equity and make it more difficult for search engines to determine which page from their index they should favor.

“The reason this is just a bit riskier . . . is you’re setting up your entire website architecture around duplicate pages,” said Long, “Basically, every single category page on the site . . . is going to push internal links to duplicate product pages, but all of the product pages that are getting internal links technically aren’t eligible to rank in the search engines.” A solution for this does exist, you can read about it in our guide to technical SEO for Shopify.

If there is no consumer need for individual variant pages and no actual benefit to the end-user, use a single page and apply canonical links to the variants.

Don't use robots.txt to block indexing of URLs with parameters. If you do that, we can't canonicalize the URLs, and you lose all of the value from links to those pages. Use rel-canonical, link cleanly internally, etc.

Using this implementation, it’s important not to noindex or block paginated URLs using robots.txt

If you’ve already implemented rel=prev and rel=next tags, there is no need to remove them. Bing and other search engines still use the tags, and they are used for web accessibility plus W3C compliance.

Pagination method 1: continue using multi-page pagination with self-referencing canonical tags to each page in the series. Keep rel=prev and rel=next if you’re already using it.